Vanno is live again. We’re still the same Company Reputation Index that we always were, but the way we go about building our rankings has changed significantly. We think the changes have resulted in a more powerful set of business tools for our subscribers. So if you’re interested in how companies treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, sign up for a free trial.
For those of you who were familiar with our free site, here’s what happened between then and now. The free site relied on “crowdsourcing” to generate the raw material – stories, votes and comments – for our analysis. While we count many serious and thoughtful people among the thousands of users of our free site, we discovered two things that led us to question the viability of a crowdsourced model for company reputations. Continue reading ‘Welcome back to Vanno!’
Social media marketers (all 100 million of them, if my Twitter count is correct) are bending over backward to congratulate themselves on the effect the 4M YouTube views of a song about a broken guitar had on United Airlines. Some social media PR types are touting the enormous brand damage done by the incident, and a journalist at the UK Times Online has even connected a 10% drop in United’s stock price with the spread of the YouTube video.
This reminds me of a similar case of social media overreach in which Vanno was directly involved. Remember the now infamous Michael Phelps bong incident? Not long after Lou Dobbs highlighted how Kellogg’s Vanno rank (a social media measure of company reputation) dropped precipitously after the bong incident, someone connected a drop in Kellogg’s stock price with the social media buzz/outrage around Kellogg’s decision to drop Phelps. Continue reading ‘The broken guitar had no effect on United Airlines’
Twitter has announced – to much fanfare and discussion - that it wants to build a reputation ranking system for its users in order to bring more credibility to its trend and search tools. In fact, Twitter trending has been one of the hottest topics on – Twitter. Having thought a lot about how to measure reputation and extract trends from social media, we wondered how Twitter planned to do this given their terse, unstructured activity streams.
Issues of users gaming the system aside (which we’ll address in a later post), 140 characters, no tweet categorization other than voluntary hashtags, and no community feedback (e.g. voting) on tweets doesn’t leave much to work with. To add a trustworthy reputation ranking system to the existing service, Twitter will likely have to introduce more structure and categorization in tweets. This will force users to work harder, and will almost certainly impact the fast, free-form ethos that now characterizes Twitter. Ironically, one of the main things that drove Twitter’s phenomenal growth – input simplicity - may be the biggest impediment to making searches and trend analyses of tweets trustworthy.
What exactly do we mean by “more structure and categorization” of user input? Well, what better way to explain it than to look at how Vanno determines the reputation of Twitter the company? To be clear, we’re analyzing the activity stream around a company to measure the reputation of a company, but the process is the same for analyzing the activity stream of a user to measure the reputation of the user. Continue reading ‘Measuring Twitter’s reputation’
Between the “Colbert bump,” Ashton Kutcher out-tweeting CNN, and Oprah’s toppling of Twitterdom last week, it looks like Vanno voters finally have twit fatigue.
Forget the February love affair with the cool, elite tech trend that went mainstream faster than cell phones. (Does anyone remember phone booths?) Vanno users were smitten with Twitter’s being used to raise money for a safe drinking water charity, and they cheered the chatter about the company’s political activism and use as a customer service tool. “Amazing,” wrote one Vanno voter about the teaming of Salesforce.com and Twitter to help make customer service smoother for Salesforce software, a service actually paid for by the venture capitalists waiting for Twitter to take off.
That love didn’t last. After tiptoeing into Vanno’s top 1,000, Twitter’s image took a hit when talk turned to money. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Stephen Colbert last week that they still don’t have a business model for their venture, but Vanno readers could smell the difference between last week’s media buzz and an actual marketing blitz. As they tried to build up enough critical mass to make Twitter profitable in some way, they seem to have alienated at least some of their former fans. “I can say ‘who cares’ in a lot less than 140 characters,” commented nicemarmot, and FlyFisherGirl wrote, “I am so tired of Twitter.”
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who helped Oprah with her inaugural tweet, brazenly called the technology “the democratization of media.” But does it really empower the people? Or is it just letting them stroke celebrity egos and send mass text messages to friends while the company figures out which tweet of the cash cow they can milk money from?
Our users’ interest in the effect of peanut butter, pot and Pot-Tarts on Kellogg’s reputation seems to be shared by many in the media. A few days ago, we put together a chart that showed the downward trend in Kellogg’s reputation, and it was kindly picked up by Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider, and then the Consumerist. Our chartsmanship itself was the subject of much debate, with perhaps the best comment coming from a Consumerist user named Gann: “This chart’s ugliness is more than offset by the complete awesomeness that it represents.”
To our surprise, things didn’t stop there. The story was picked up by a remarkably wide variety of media, from Fast Company, NBC, ABC, Advertising Age, the Atlantic and the Globe and Mail to the Huffington Post and PerezHilton.
Some commentators even tried to link the drop in Kellogg’s reputation to its recent financial performance. Of course, Vanno isn’t in the stock price prediction business and, as anyone who looks under the hood at our scoring algorithm will see, we’re well aware that correlation is not necessarily causation. It was, however, fun to see people passionately debate the possibilities.
We’re gratified by the attention, particularly from CNN and Lou Dobbs, but most happy to see people using Vanno to turn a brighter light on the behavior of the companies that inhabit our lives.
Inquiring minds have asked for more insight into the math behind Vanno’s reputation trending. To illustrate this, let’s take a closer look at Kellogg’s precipitous drop from Vanno’s top 10 after a series of strange affairs involving peanut butter, bongs and Pop-Tarts.
Continue reading ‘The mathematics of reputation – exactly how much did Michael Phelps hurt Kellogg?’
Yes, people like us and we’re not just saying it! The proof is in the pudding, or in our case in the library. This week, St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia referenced Vanno as a tool for Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility research. We’ve been strategically packaged in a Toolbox for investigating corporate ethics, alongside The Better Business Bureau and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Reinforcement.
This seems consistent with the mission of SJU’s Haub School of Business- “to support the aspirations of students to master the fundamental principles and practices of business in a diverse, ethical, and globally aware context.” We see this as a great step toward a future of ethical business owners and the communities that surround them.
We’re pleased to be referenced by this prestigious university, which will hopefully be the first of many universities and communities of intellectuals that use our advanced reputation index to research and reference company reputations and the social news that builds these rankings.
When I went to graduate school at CU in the ’70s, there was a saying among the many Boulderites who came for an education and never left - something about Boulder being a great place not to live up to your potential. Boulder still has its share of climbers and ski bums with accidental Ph.Ds, but thanks to Kevin Vasquez and Trisha McKean of the CU Foundation, Susan and I got a chance last week to see firsthand how the university – and the Leeds Business School in particular – has moved Boulder squarely into prime time.
Continue reading ‘Living up to their potential in Boulder’
One of the things that has been fun at Vanno is to virtually meet our new users. For instance, take a look at pinkuff and kjripp. Both are Experienced Influencers who have been blogging on Social Media, Corporate Reputation, and related topics for quite some time. Checkout their blogs: pinkuff and kjripp
Do any other Vanno Influencers have a blog? Let me know in the comments. I would love to see what other Influencers are saying on their blog.
Rafe Needleman, in a recent review of Vanno, calls us a “crowdsourced Better Business Bureau 2.0″. The Better Business Bureau part is pretty clear, but how exactly does crowdsourcing apply to what we’re doing?
Continue reading ‘Crowdsourcing done right’
